Should we give Earth a scientific designation?

[Seret]

Why are they going to such colleges if they're so ignorant? One would assume someone trying to get a degree in biology sciences would not be so daft about those things.

Give em a break, they're young.

[NFUN]

Astronomers are famous for using pretty dry designations for astronomical bodies, but they're actually going to give a lot of the exoplanets colloquial names too:

http://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming_exoplanets/

I'm sorry, but I can't stop!

[Tery215]

I think there's a simpler way to name it, but completely fails to define it.

1a-1-1

(first galaxy, first galactic arm, first star, first planet in the system)

All of it's the first, it's easy that way.

(edit)

I realized this system is very likely to hurt other aliens' state of mind.

As such, I make a new name system:

Greenway-Carl-Prals47-Earth

(galaxy name, galactic arm name, star name, planet name)

If we turn out on the top of space development, I think it's fair to say that we can call the galaxy Greenway (out of sheer military power).

Edited September 3, 2014 by Tery215

[vexx32]

It would be best for everyone to stay on-topic. Chat threads are forbidden, and for good reason -- this is a forum, not an IM service. If there is any further derailment, we will take measures against it. That includes people who feel the need to throw reaction images and videos into the thread just to point out it's gone off-topic; it really doesn't help anything.

[Armchair Rocket Scientist]

One thing that was learnt a while ago when discovering the moons of the gas giants is that numbering satellites in order of distance from their primary is a bad idea, because new discoveries mess up the numbers. That's why today we designate exoplanets in order of discovery.

So for our solar system, I would say the Earth is Sun g, since it was only recognised as a planet after the naked-eye planets. The naming of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn would be somewhat arbitrary, it might be better to just go in order rather than try and research historical observations.

What the OP is talking about is more akin to a classification scheme. They're popular in sci-fi and such a classification would be useful for databases, but computing will probably develop enough to be able to handle freeform descriptions obviating the need for a code.

Yep. The moons of some of the giant planets originally had roman numeral designations (e.g. Jupiter III is Ganymede) but those aren't really used anymore. The named moons are just referred to by their names, and the unnamed ones have numerical designations based on the date of discovery among other things.

Earth, incidentally, would probably be called Sol b. The others were known since antiquity, but Earth was known about long before humans ever thought of systematically looking at the sky and realized some of the stars moved. As far as recognition of a planet goes, the other planets weren't really recognized as planets by a modern definition until about the same time the Earth was, i.e. when the geocentric cosmology was falsified.

PS: No planet is ever called "Starname a", the first discovered is b. Possibly a is implicitly the star itself.

Pretty much, but stars are referred to with capital letters (which aren't normally used for a single star). For example, Alpha Centauri consists of Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. I think the designation is in order of mass, but it might be in order of discovery (those usually match up anyway).

Planets extend the classification. For instance, Kepler 16 includes Kepler-16A, Kepler-16B, and Kepler-16b. This seems a little odd; I'd think they'd call it Kepler-16c to avoid confusion. With planets orbiting one of the stars in a binary, the planets have the star's name, but extended. For instance, Gliese 667 Cc is the second planet discovered orbiting Gliese 667 C.

Presumably exomoons would continue the same classification scheme. For example, Earth's moon would be Sun bb.